One person’s pet is another person’s snack
Here in America, there seems to be an unwritten taboo against eating any animal that could even remotely be described as “cute.”
Yes, we do eat chickens, pigs, and cows, all of which are adorable as babies, but we wait until they’ve grown up and lost their adorableness before we decide they’re fit for human consumption. We don’t shoot deer until they have stopped resembling Bambi.
It seems any time the topic of people in other parts of the world eating cats or dogs comes up, your average American will think it is most revolting.
Much as I love animals, I frankly see nothing wrong with the idea of eating cats and dogs. As long as I don’t have to look at it with its fur on and see puppy dog eyes looking at me, I will try anything at least once, provided it is not a member of my own species.
An experience I had over winter break confirmed this idea.
I spent my winter break in Ecuador, as I do every year. One Saturday, my family teamed up with some friends of ours and an Ecuadorian pastor friend of theirs and visited communities that had been affected by a recent volcanic eruption. A community leader in one town decided to thank us by giving us lunch.
It started out fairly innocently with a very tasty homemade chicken soup. The next course … let’s just say it was a cultural experience. There on my plate lay a fully cooked, headless guinea pig!
Having grown up in Ecuador, I knew that being served guinea pig was an honor, since it is a delicacy there. I had always wanted to try one, but had never had the chance until now.
Now that there was a guinea pig right there in front of me, sitting on my plate, just begging to be eaten, I wasn’t entirely sure how to eat it.
As one might guess from looking at a live one, they aren’t exactly fleshy little creatures. They do not get any fleshier when they are killed and cooked. They have a very tough hide, which only gets tougher when cooked.
I glanced surreptitiously at the pastor to see how he handled his meal. I followed his lead and simply picked it up with my hands and bit off parts of it until only the skeleton remained. (Though I will admit that, unlike the pastor, I left some of the skin over. I have yet to figure out how people can chew that stuff.)
As I somewhat expected, the meat was actually quite tasty. Like chicken (funny how everything tastes like chicken except actual chicken these days), except a little sweeter.
While we were eating, the pastor entertained us with a story of a foreigner who was served guinea pig for the first time. The setting was a rather dark room, and when the man reached for his guinea pig to eat it, he felt a sharp bite on his finger. The cook had not removed the head, and therefore, the teeth were still intact.
I was glad I wasn’t bitten by my dead meal like the unfortunate foreigner, but I was still happy to be able to say I’d done something that would weird out most of my friends back in America: I had willingly eaten a cute, furry creature.
And boy was it delicious!
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum